On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 11:16:32PM -0000, Fiona Moore wrote:
But from Hostage on, they were written for Brian Croucher. Anyway, I don't see why having different actors in the same role should be a problem: look at Hamlet, for heaven's sake. Or a bit closer to home, what about Doctor Who? Most of the scripts were written for generic-Doctor-and-companion, and the individual quirks were put in by the script editor and the actors.
Anyway, in the Travis case it's the same character-- bit of a difference between a script written for a particular character being played by a different actor than the one the writer expected, and a script originally written for Blake being adapted to be for Avon.
The problem is, Travis I and Travis II are too different. Yes, it is possible for the same character to be played by more than one actor successfully (and I don't just mean different productions of the same play). A good example of this is Stargate the movie as compared to Stargate SG-1 the series; the character of Daniel Jackson was played by James Spader in the movie and Michael Shanks in the series, and the "join" is seamless; they feel like the same character. The other character that appeared in both was Colonel Jack O'Neill, played by Kurt Russell in the movie and Richard Dean Anderson in the series. They are notably different; the Kurt Russell character is cold and burnt out, while the Richard Dean Anderson character is emotive and sarcastic. One *can* explain the difference by saying that O'Neill in the movie was still devastated by the death of his son, and the "real" O'Neill is the one we see in the series.
But Travis has no excuse... unless you blame the retraining therapists for turning a cold, sharp, snooty Alpha into a thuggy Beta who worked his way up the ranks. They are two completely different people.
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "You better listen to me. I'll tell him you were in here. I'll tell him it's all a plot. You're just using him to get that open. Yes. You know how he'd react to that, don't you? You don't mean that really is what's going on? That'd make you crazier than him." -- Vila to Norl (Blake's 7: City at the Edge of the World [C6])